From the 1st to the 17th of October the Italian town of Bergamo hosts the 8th annual BergamoScienza Festival. The organizers state in their introduction to the program that their goal is to take science onto the street and make it accessible to maximum number of people possible, and the festival hosts an impressive number of scientists from all over the world.

Various themes are addressed through lectures, round table discussions, theatrical shows, events and the opening to the public of various research centres in and around the city.

There are a host of international and Italian guest speakers including Craig Ventner, who participates in a video conference addressing the issue of artificial call manufacture using synthetic DNA and Prof Carlo Alberto Redi of The University of Pavia who chairs a conference about synthetic biology. Both issues that have recently investigated on this site. Other speakers are nobel prize winners Martin Chalfie and Eric Richard Kandel.

Other conferences that may be of interest to readers broach the problem of scientific approaches adopted in the study of global warming and the ethical problems of using animals to produce and test organs for human transplant.

The BergamoScienze website gives further details and the down-loadable program offers an introduction to all of the 177 events taking place during the festival.

Follow also BergamoScienza Channel on YouTube